Fire

by Thaisa Frank | Mar 29, 2021 | micro

I’m in Flamineo’s trailer when we hear the ringmaster yelling that the fire-eater left to marry his high school sweetheart.  We’re in bed, pretending I’m a stranger in the audience and Flamineo’s guessing my name.  The ringmaster must knock three times before we pick our way over Flamineo’s sorcerer’s hats and the snake costume I wore last night.

He didn’t even leave a fucking note, says the ringmaster. He just told the ceiling-walker he was going to Iowa.

He sits at the formica table and pours wine without asking.

Fuck high school sweethearts, he says.  You’ll be a cobra for five more minutes to make up for his act.

I say I can’t manage five more minutes with my legs curled over my head.

Of course you can, he says.

But when Flamineo starts lifting him by the wrists, the ringmaster pulls away, blows his nose and says he’ll fill the time himself.      

After he leaves, Flamineo says the fire-eater made a good bargain, trading fire for love. I remind him the fire-eater said that swallowing fire is like swallowing a comet and he’s sure to trade love for fire again. Flamineo says I’m just saying that to make him feel better because the fire-eater was lucky enough to have a high school sweetheart.

I remind him that all the women in the circus want him, but he kicks me with his heel and says he doesn’t want to be with someone who loves him because he can read minds, lift weights twice his size, and recite Hamlet backwards. He wants someone who loved him in high school before all that. But he ran away to be a circus freak and he’s nothing but a four-foot pill bug. He wraps himself in the quilt and won’t talk.

Flamineo isn’t a pill bug. When he introduces his act he’s a flaming tumbleweed. All the women in the circus want him and we never know whom he’ll sleep with next. Once he read that microbes were 90% of the human body and said he’d drink a bottle of antiseptic and be 100% himself–larger than any of us, who are only 10%.  We took turns keeping watch until he said he was joking.

Eventually, Flamineo faces me and once more pretends he’s guessing my name.  He guesses three times before he gets it right. It’s thrilling to be forgotten and remembered. 

The Eighth Silo

by Kathryn Phelan | Mar 26, 2021 | micro

The sugar beet factory across the street from my house exploded when I was eight. It flamed out in a blue blaze of molasses that lifted cars a mile away. This was panhandle Nebraska and such events were extraordinary: seven silos down, the eighth held erect by the sugar it still contained. My sisters and I ran outside and licked sweetness off the wooden deck, the trampoline, the grass. We could not believe our luck. The harvest was ruined but dessert was everywhere. My parents stood at the fence and watched us grow sticky with sugar dust, lobbing unconvincing protests about hygiene. It was the year they couldn’t hold themselves up, and neither could sugar and neither could we.

Bird Resuscitation

by Jamie Cooper | Mar 22, 2021 | micro

You stuff chunks of a frozen bird into your pockets. Outside, the world is spinning. A homeless man asks you for some change, so you hand him a headless bird. He holds it like a broken child. With the bird parts stuffed into your pockets, it almost feels like flying. You walk past a restaurant and see a man in a window eating a small bird, feathers and all. You walk into a store to buy a pack of gum, and you hand over three little bird heads with the beaks still attached. The clerk sweeps them up like change. He tells you that the summer is waiting for you.

You step outside onto a cold island. Birds wash up at your feet. You want to save as many as you can, but your pockets are already bogged down with frozen bird parts. You sit on a bench, and you try to piece together a bird from memory. Like the blind, you go by feel, until the bird takes shape in your hand. You sew the bird together with purple yarn. You start a fire in a trashcan to warm the bird.

The bird twitches in your hands. You feel the bones like toothpicks. It squawks to life, just a little at first, but soon it reaches an earsplitting pitch. It flaps its wings hysterically and pecks at your wrist until it draws blood. You throw the bird as hard as you can and lick the blood from your wrist. The bird bounces a few times and flaps until it gets its bearings and shoots off into the sky.

Warm from the fire, you lie down on the grass. You can feel other bird parts come to life in your pockets. You can see them move around under your clothes. The bird in the sky shoots off toward the moon. It flies so fast its wings melt as it leaves the atmosphere. It flies past the ice on Europa. Soon it will fly past the Sun. Soon it is no more than the memory of a broken bird you once kept in your pocket as you walked the streets of a small cold planet, littered with bones.

In Which Sophie and I Clear a Forest

by Anita Lo | Mar 18, 2021 | micro

The crab apples had disappeared from Sophie’s grove across the street last week, but I didn’t notice until Sophie got lice. They were easy to spot because she pulled her braids so tight, scalp bright and taut in the hairline, a barren main street that the tiny crawlers crossed after looking both ways. Like we always did when her mom came home smelling of motel soap or when my mom nervously warned me not to get too close to her kind of family, we climbed into the throng of reddening trees to strategize.

I already know who did it, she said, biting at the ends of her hair. It’s Mom’s new boyfriend Nikolai, who only showers once a week.

Ugh, I said, secretly imagining what it would be like to be so close to someone that a tiny insect could crawl from their crown to yours.

The only solution, she continued, is to cut it all down. By the time I realized that she was talking about the apples she was halfway down the trunk. We found the ax in the garage too heavy to swing, making only a shallow gash in the barklike a notch in a flute.

Sophie said we would think of something else.

The next week when I saw her she was very unevenly bald. She explained that Nikolai had suggested suffocating the lice with mayonnaise and clingfilm. That night, egg-haired and crinkly, Sophie had stolen into her mom’s bedroom and shaved herself with Nikolai’s razor.

We went outside with the crosscut saw I had reluctantly borrowed from my parents. The blade quickly stuck and I fell backward pulling it out of the tree’s stubborn new mouth.

Actually, Sophie, I don’t think you should do this, I said the next week, as she repeatedly scratched the matchstick across a rock. She knelt in the slimy October leaves while I stood yards away, running my fingers over the ax-gash in our first tree.

But it’s so perfect, she said. They’re Nikolai’s matches.

I just think you could get hurt.

Fine, she said, staring at me. You can just watch from your house.

I hesitated and then I ran. From my bedroom window that day and the days after I watched the sunset behind the inky boughs of the rain-wet grove, and Sophie squatting small and solid under her umbrella waiting for something to catch.

And This Is How It Ended

by Yasmina Din Madden | Mar 15, 2021 | micro

The End

Me at his door, trying to convince him I was a good person. But I wasn’t a good person back then, needy and egotistical, kind and then poisonous. On his doorstep that day, David told me I was like a creeping bellflower, a weed people mistake for a flower and let run rampant in their gardens. The problem is, he told me, a weed is a weed. I looked up creeping bellflower, and it did have beautiful bluebells crawling up its stalks. It also has an extensive root system, so it spreads quickly and chokes out the other plants. A weed is a weed.

Three Months Earlier

I surprised David with small gifts while I cheated on him with a fellow teacher, a writer who often dropped phrases like sign as both mark and meaning into conversation. I let him tease me for dating David, the school’s landscaper. The last gift I gave David was a cactus in a minuscule ceramic pot. The gift before that, a Zen garden with a Lilliputian rake. Before that, a dwarf Bonsai tree. That all of these gifts were miniatures seem a sign of the tightness of my heart back then, the smallness of who I was. Or maybe they signified nothing at all.

A Year Before

David helped me start a plot in the community garden, where we planted tomatoes and lettuces. When tiny leaves sprouted, he bent to inspect them, his hands deft as he pressed a leaf between thumb and forefinger. He gave me directions on watering and aeration, but I only half-listened, savoring the taste of words like bonemeal and humus. That I could grow anything astounded me, although I knew it wouldn’t be long before the plot burned out.

The Beginning

David and I ate lunch in the school’s garden—raised beds of beans, cucumbers and squash. He once plucked a fat heirloom tomato from the vine and held it up for careful inspection. Seeds are passed down each season to preserve desirable traits like juiciness or color, he explained, holding up the misshapen tomato, shades of purple and deep orange stretched across its skin. Each variety is genetically unique, and that’s what gives them a resistance to pests and diseases. The French sometimes call it pomme d’amour, he added, and offered me a taste.

Numbers

by Noreen Hyde | Mar 11, 2021 | micro

Nationwide that year, 128 officers were killed in the line of duty. My father is number 87 in the official report, arranged chronologically by death date.  When it arrived in the mail, glossy and sleek like a new car brochure, my mother barely glanced at it before tossing it in our recycling bin. I dug it out when she wasn’t looking, hid it under my pillow. I look at it at night, using my flashlight friend stuffed penguin. I can quick squeeze him off if I hear her coming. Dad replaced his batteries a few weeks before it happened.  After, he rough-tickled-tucked me in, tousling my hair after kissing my cheek. His scratchy stubble the perfect prelude to my soft pillows.

The average age was 46; my father was 41. His blue steel coffin cost $5,678.98, (I found the receipt). It was smooth and cold when I put my hands on the edges, looking in at Dad. Cleanly shaved in his uniform, he rested on fancy pillows, eyes closed. I was willing myself to touch him when Aunt Kathy appeared. I didn’t get another chance.

Forty-two, 33% of the deaths, were from car accidents. Of that, 17% were caused by drivers failing to yield for police on roadways assisting motorists. My father is one of those. There is now a local campaign to raise awareness of “move over” laws. My father’s smiling picture appears next to all the newspaper articles about it.

Aunt Kathy says Dad is still saving lives. Preventing future accidents. I see more of her now than ever, with mom needing her rest, her many naps.  Aunt Kathy orders delivery; we eat in front of the TV. We order for mom too but usually, hers just sits, cooling and alone. Aunt Kathy lets me pick the shows. She’s only firm about bedtime: 8:15 on the dot.

I don’t argue. I like reading the report under my covers. Colored graphs, neat columns, photos, pie charts tell the stories in different ways. Dad’s photo wasn’t selected for his category’s pages. But the final ones, labeled “Other Causes,” have one picture each.  I touch their faces as I read them:  helicopter crash, horse-related accident, poison. These are the smallest slices of the pie charts, the tiniest lines of the graphs. I peer into their ageless eyes, wondering how it can be they don’t count as a full one percent.